![]() “He got me to play this crazy lady who opens her handbag and coins come out,” she says with a laugh. In part that’s thanks to her neighbor, commercial director Jamie Winterstern, who sometimes recruits her for roles. Having long viewed acting as a career like any other, at 92 she continues to work. Some would argue that starring solo in a show night after night is the antithesis of easy, but Rush doesn’t see it that way. “We had a really long run with that because it was an easy thing,” she posits. “She really was fantastic,” Cowan says.Įventually Rush also traveled with the show to Canada, Chicago and San Francisco. She was also struck by her mother’s ability to take a character from childhood to death, acting alone on a stage. While it had only 13 performances at New York’s Biltmore Theatre in 1984, it found a second life as a touring production.Ĭowan recalls being impressed with the long lines for the show when it debuted at the small Back Alley Theater in Los Angeles. One of her proudest moments actually came on Broadway, when she starred in a one-woman play adapted by her friend Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, from Hailey’s novel A Woman of Independent Means. “We didn’t even think about things like that. In both film and television, being choosy about roles was simply not an option, Rush recalls. Her credits are numerous, spread across several decades and highlighted by appearances on beloved series like Batman and Murder, She Wrote. Photo courtesy of Zuma Press Inc/Alamy Stock Photo.īy the middle of the 1960s, Rush had tired of Hollywood’s studio system, which had her bouncing between Paramount, Universal and 20th Century Fox, and set her sights on TV. Cowan recalls benefiting as a kid from some unique babysitting arrangements: “While my mom made movies with Paul Newman, I got to have playdates with his daughter,” she says. Many are likely to recognize Rush’s daughter, Sausalito resident Claudia Cowan, from her role as a West Coast senior correspondent for the Fox News Channel. “I thought Paul was a wonderful actor, but he was also a wonderful person,” Rush says. Rush’s second husband, Warren Cowan, served for years as Newman’s publicist. They become quite close on Philadelphians, forming a friendship that endured until Newman’s death in 2008. Besides co-starring in The Young Philadelphians in 1959, he and Rush were also paired for the 1967 western Hombre. Paul Newman likewise left a lasting impression. He’d just pick him up and run out to the car with him.” Dean called him Spider and he kept tossing him around. He was very, very thin and kind of frail but he just loved Dean Martin. He never really tried to learn his lines. Martin and Clift became fast friends on the Lions set, she recalls. She was rewarded for the latter the following year with a Golden Globe for “Most Promising Newcomer – Female.” Only a few years later, she’d play opposite the imposing trio of Brando, Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift in 1958’s The Young Lions. Rush doesn’t recall the details of the test (“You’re talking to somebody with amnesia!”), but it wasn’t long before she made her movie debut in 1950’s The Goldbergs and went on to star in the 1953 sci-fi cult classic It Came from Outer Space. ![]() Pleased with the results, he put her under contract. That’s when Milton Lewis, a talent scout for Paramount, asked her to take a screen test. Rush got her start in the theatrical program at UC Santa Barbara before joining the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse for two years. That’s in addition to many television appearances and a stage career that included a solo starring role on Broadway. She’s been in the business nearly 70 years, and her filmography includes projects with the likes of Paul Newman, Marlon Brando and Kim Novak. Humility is an admirable trait, but in Rush’s case, bragging is warranted. “I don’t really consider myself to be like all of those people on magazines and so forth,” the 92-year-old former Hollywood star explains from her home in Beverly Hills. Barbara Rush doesn’t like to make a fuss when it comes to her career. ![]()
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